so, ek pulled a stunt. The nuclear option.

To mess with my little bearish bet and to redeem his own reputation, he hurdled another boatload of sats into the Yes contract — and bribed stackers to post and comment! Man, oh man, it's been an interesting few weeks.

I started to get cocky with this bet, seeing (every two weeks) how that graph for SN items went further and further away from the bet target line (#914289). ...and alas, hubris was punished by the universe.

Bet was going my way, SN activity is gradually dying, there are/were no more people flocking to this wonderful and incestuous circle jerk of a forum... so instead of building a great(er) product, @ek threw plenty of good sats after bad ones... only to thwart little me, and teach me a lesson.

It was an ingenuous plot: Bribe the Stackers to post as much nonsense as possible. And posting nonsense, we did... 9,404 comments in nine days (#948515), for a neat little boost to the SN daily rate of about 1,000 a day... incidentally, that's roughly the ballpark difference between the pre-stunt daily SN activity and what we need for the end of the year.

I gotta confess: when ek's stunt first took off, I was terrified. The rate at which the comment number shot up was SCARY AF, given that I'm massively on the "wrong" side of this bet.

The nonsense was so nonsensy that both I and the worthy 3rd-place-finisher @NovaRift (#965733) got a really bad taste in our mouths... ugh, what have we been part of!

I don't think ek realizes how desperately off SN is compared to this bet. In fact, the SN deficit, compared to the 1.4m bet, is sooo yuuuuge that you literally gotta repeat one of these Most Comments Wins post every other week for the rest of the year. That's gonna cost yah...

Somehow I don't think the Stackers will be here for it... and it'd be turning SN into the very low-quality shitposting hellhole ek is working for it not to be. Irony is proooo-fooooound

ek had to bribe us assmilkers almost 60k sats, and all he got for it was north of 9,000 comments. Implied rate: 6.33 sats per comment (@AGORA, set up the market, and ek can just bail out my ~14,000 sats of exposure whenever he feels like it, rather than having me spam "fuck" two-thousand times during more of these bribery fests).

I was wrong to, initially, suggest that it wouldn't even show up for the report. It did:

yep, that's where we're at... that's what you bought for 60k, ek. ("It's not about the money, but about sending a message!")

Our daily rate for the month was 1,236 items, well above anything we've seen in recent months, but much lower than you'd expect after a stunt like this. Time is working against yah. For the year as a whole we're at 1,133 items a day, while we need 1,550. We're 33% through the year, but only 24% toward the goal. Since we're so far behind, we need 1,764 items a day for the rest of the year. (a similar ek stunt boost every other week).

I'll believe it when I see it.

So no, @grayruby, I ain't selling my Predyx shares (@mega_dreamer UNHAPPY!); I will just calmly call bullshit on this entertaining lil adventure.

previous Predyx bet update posts: #944412, #900000, #914289, #930665